April 22, 2013

Last week, I was working on Loochi’s iOS application and spent some time trying to increase the frequency at which I could send updates from the app to the lamp.

In this article, I share some of my experience tuning this with the Bluegiga BLE112 module. The short answer is that you should use CBCharacteristicWriteWithoutResponse for maximum speed. This made a huge improvement.

April 03, 2013

JavaScript is a great programming language and lots of people are familiar with it. It should be no surprise that manyhavecompiled nodejs for the Raspberry Pi and built npm packages dedicated to it.

We love nodejs and the expressiveness of JavaScript is perfect for embedded applications, however, we felt that it was:

Still, too hard (and too long) to install nodejs on the Raspberry Pi

Not convenient to edit code directly on the pi

Hard to debug long running process

We aim to fill that gap with pijs.io. PiJS lets you write code for your Raspberry Pi in your browser, deploys automatically to your Raspberry Pi, restarts automatically when the RaspberryPi is rebooted and even gives you a web-console to watch what’s going on.

Of course, it’s completely free (to use - and open source) and you can start using it today. Let’s walk through the initial setup.

I thought I would point this out because it’s one of the great things Elektor has been doing as part of their new online strategy: Magazines need to adapt to survive and I think they are doing a pretty good job.

I still think access to their forums should be free but at least they are trying something new and different. Big up to them!

Disclaimer: I have been an avid reader of elektor for as long as I can remember (my dad has always been a subscriber) - and I have learnt a lot thanks to them! But TBideas is not affiliated with them in any way ;)

February 08, 2013

Update: If you are interested in the Raspberry Pi, we think you will find our latest project interesting too: pijs.io is a web environment to write and run javascript programs on the rpi.

We recently decided to start moving our efforts from Arduino to the Raspberry Pi. Arduino is great for embedded projects and has served us well but connecting an Arduino to the Internet is extremely expensive: paying $100 for a micro-controller and a wifi board is not a good start for an embedded project.

One of the limitations of the Raspberry Pi is that it offers only one PWM output. Some people work around this by plugging a raspberry pi to an arduino or using external PWM generator but we were looking for something simpler and cheaper.

In this article we will show you how we connected a Raspberry Pi to a high power RGB led. Our solution does not require any other hardware and is extremely easy to reproduce!

January 15, 2013

It’s been a while since we shared progress on our prototypes. Loochi 0.5 should have been the “pre-production version” but we ran into a few issues:

The vias under the micro-controller caused some shortcuts. It took me a pretty long time to understand what was going on. I tried putting some tape between the CPU and the board but it became almost impossible to solder the cpu…

The bluetooth low energy module we were using is not yet available publicly and only in very small quantity so I switched back to Bluegiga BLE112.

We did some physical adjustments because the first board did not fit perfectly in the base and the lenses holes were not in the right place (I messed up some basic sin/cosine math … shame on me)

Anyway, Loochi 0.5 is dead - long live Loochi 0.6! I just finished building the first one and it works perfectly. This is great news: after weeks spent focusing on the hardware we will be able to switch our effort on the software.

As we announced before, we want your feedback and we will be sharing those boards with you guys. If you are interested by a Loochi electronic board (without the plastic and heatsink) put your name in the comments below, let us know what you want to do with it and we will send you one. We will probably build no more than 10 of those - it’s your chance to get a very unique Loochi … for free!

January 07, 2013

Loochi’s campaign ended yesterday night at midnight. We sent a big thank you to all our backers, you can read it here.

Of course we have known for a while that without a miracle we would not be able to make it and we started to look at 2013 with brand new eyes. We met in late december to set a few principles for 2013. Here they are.

November 28, 2012

This was initially intended to be on our crowdfunding campaign page but we realized that there were a little too many details for most of our backers. So for those who really want to understand everything, here is the detail of how we are going to manufacture each part of Loochi.

The lack of details is really what is frustrating us today, as if we all have to accept failure / rejection sometimes in our live, we certainly all want to know why in order to try to do better and avoid it next time… That’s why today we ask for your help !

November 25, 2012

Our goal is to provide a completely open-source smart lamp that anyone can build and tinker with. We hope it will be the basis of many exciting projects in the next few months.

We have covered the electronics in great details but when you are building a lamp, the actual object matters at least as much as what’s hidden inside! For many of us electronic or software geeks, actually building an object can seem quite scary and it would probably have been just a few years ago. However with recent progress in 3d printing, it has became incredibly easy!

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In this post, we will look at the different components that compose Loochi, describe their roles and how to build the plastic parts.

Loochi’s components

November 08, 2012

Following our project post for 1st of November, we finally heard back from Kickstarter! As they come with a bunch of questions about the product and we expect to receive next week whole 3D-printed elements to assemble a complete prototype, we have decided to take the time to build it before asking them to validate the project again in 2-4 weeks. We are sorry about such delay, but be sure it will allow us to propose you an even better Loochi ;)

October 11, 2012

Loochi electronic is now ready for manufacturing

We have made huge progress to identify what components are really required to bring you the best quality at the best price. We restarted our design from scratch to reduce the number of components and optimize their use.

August 17, 2012

So we have been so busy building and experiment with our latest prototypes that we almost forgot to share some pictures with you.

We did share some on facebook but for those of you who are following here on the blog, here they are!

Illumi v0.2

This is the prototype (actually one of them, we have built three) running in the living room next to a LCD TV and a roof lightbulb (above the door) to give you a rough idea of the LED power.

We are pretty happy with the power of this prototype. It gives a lot of light and the driver heats reasonably. It is a much more sustainable solution than the first linear driver (that was described in another post; it’s still a nice solution if you want something cheap and quick to build for development).

August 17, 2012

If you have read our previous post, you know how easy it is to connect a RGB led to an Arduino micro-controller. It is amazing to put this thing in a corner of your room and change the color during the night but chances are … you will be the only one impressed by that.

The very basic LED we used in our previous post has a power of 45mW (go ahead, take the datasheet and do the math, it is an interesting exercice, post your results below!) and generates less than one lumen of luminous flux. This is not enough to light anything so you will quickly want to use much more powerful LEDs.

In this post, we will see how to build a very cheap linear LED driver and plug it to our Arduino so that you can actually drive high power RGB LED with the same software we used last time. This time, it gets impressive!

August 07, 2012

This is the first post in a series of article on how to build your own Illumi lamp and how to develop for it. This first article gives you the very basic information you need to get started doing some programming if you dont have much soldering skills.

It will still be a few weeks before the well-polished Illumi is available for distribution in quantities but if you are a developer and want to start working on your own apps that connects and talks to Illumi, we want to show you how to get started today!

In this post, we will show you how to connect a basic RGB Led to an Arduino micro-controller and connect to it with your iPhone. Of course, it will not make a lot of light, but it is enough to start programming. You do not even need to solder.

July 10, 2012

June 24, 2012

This new blog is dedicated to all entrepreneurs trying to turn their ideas and visions into real products. We will try to regroup here our thoughts around creation process + tips & useful tools we discover & use, hopping all of this could help you as much as online ressources help us for our projects.

T&B team - http://www.tbideas.com

We believe that a smarter environment can improve your life at home and at the office. TBIdeas mixes design and technology to create physical objects that improves everyday life. Any suggestions or questions, do not hesitate to contact us!